Four Years, Solstice, Teeth, Tomorrow

Today is four years since my beautiful Nonna passed away. I awoke feeling her spirit near. My mom sent me a text with the above photo included in it. This is one of our favourite photos of my Nonna. Can you see her gentleness, her curiosity, her love, her love, her love?!

The women will gather, four generations deep, and share stories and memories about her. We will look at photos and drink wine and eat food in her honour.

I miss her every single day. I was recently gifted with some of her jewelry. I wear it every day. They make me feel even closer to her – a gold pendant with an etched image of a nun on the front, and the date of her retirement on the back. Nonna worked at Hotel Dieu Grace Hospital as a seamstress and was extremely close with the women, many of whom were nuns, that ran the hospital. I love knowing that she wore this piece with pride, and that the golden image hung close to her heart.

I was gifted two of her rings.

I remember seeing the red-studded (garnet) ring on her hand. She wore it all the time. In fact, when I received it, there was a cut in the gold band from having it cut off her finger during one of her hospital stays. I remember it often shifted to the side when it was on her finger. The ring on with the blue and yellow stones is called a ‘family ring’, which I’d never heard of before! But the stones represent the birthstones of the women in the family. I don’t remember seeing this ring on her hand, but apparently she wore this one all the time too! Her birthstone is sapphire (September), and I can see the sapphire stones in the ring.

I love that she used her hands to cook and sew and these rings were part of those expressions of her daily love.

What I miss about her these days is her open home, arms and heart. We used to have these incredible heart-to-heart talks in the kitchen. She’d be tearing radicchio lettuce or snipping green bean tips or stirring homemade sugo…and listening to me unleash my existential woes. We’d laugh and cry and eat. She’d hug me hard, my body softening into hers. The healing was precise and consistent. I miss her house, the sanctuary of it. The fact that she was always there – in the spaces, birthing smells, creating clothing, ironing…I miss that at the ends of long days, she’d sit in the most uncomfortable (!) chair in the living room, fold her swollen-knuckle hands in her lap and smile. So happy just to be there. Tired, buzzed, but so, so happy.

I miss her body…her skin, her eyes, her smile, her teeth, her hands…always so rough in the fingertips, but so gentle in the loving uses. I can, ‘thank the good lord’ (as she always said), still feel her love and energy swirling inside and around me. She’s in my reflection. It’s an honour to see her in my cheekbones and belly and boobs. But…I’ll weep today…missing her still…grateful for knowing her, holding her, loving her…and being loved, being held, being known by her.

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Summer Solstice

June 20th, the summer solstice, was a day filled with wild energy and learning. I started the morning with a write in my journal and a four-card pull from my favourite oracle deck. Of course, the pull, the messages were bang on as they always are, and I felt (feel!) hopeful and peaceful about the possibilities for this summer for work, family and friendships.

Thank you to Cristina for joining me on the pool deck, beside the body of water, and under the nearly-full moon sky for sharing a welcome-in-summer ceremony. We talked, we laughed, we cried…we howled under the strawberry moon. Summer is here and thriving. I hope to keep this energy in my mind and body as I the long-lighted days continue.

Teeth

Oscar had to have eleven teeth pulled! But, the surgery went well, and he’s healing well…back to his sassy, sleepy self!

I take him to the vet tomorrow for a follow-up. He’s been LOVING the soft, wet food he gets to eat, and is putting some of the weight he lost back on. Goodness, he’s lovin’ life…feasting and sleeping and loving! Thanks for all the texts/call of love for him! Woof! Woof!

Tomorrow…

Jett graduates from high school. My guts are knotty, and I’m doing my best to flow with this rite of passage…I found my journal from when I graduated from high school. June 1997. I laughed as I read it…for there was but a few lines of writing about exams and grades, words about exercise…and pages about boys. The boy I loved, the boy who didn’t love me back, the tumult of relationships in different shades of love. But, a few weeks post, I found a long journal where the deep, deeps fro that time in my life found their voice.

…High school is finished. My life, whole and complete as it was for five years, is no longer. Period. Part of me wants to take it all down, put it in a box and mark it with ‘high school’. Yet, still, the awards hang, dusty, on crooked nails, constantly representing spirit, community, excellence and knowledge. This is me. This is my life and all I want to do is crawl into the land of ‘everything I want’…There are so many things I want to do. All as important as each other. All possibilities of dynamic experiences I can create. I’m anxious all the time. I want to be finished university, finished school. I want to live in my own place – decorate it, paint it – create it. I want a puppy – puppy kisses, puppy pee, puppy nose, puppy walks. I want to travel around the world, to sky dive, scuba dive, climb mountains, swim in oceans. I want to change the world so everyone shares, and respects nature and each other. Money must die. Love must live…”

“July 7, 1997 – 1:36am – Journal entry

I love any sentence that begins with ‘I want to change the world…’ I wrote that sentence twenty-seven years ago. Honestly, it feels like way longer…I still know a lot of that young woman…I still feel that urge, that yearning for Big Dreams to come true.

And this…a couple of weeks later…

“…I don’t know who I am.
And what does that mean anyway? Who am I?
Artists express in lyrics, on canvas, on paper
the inner growth of themselves.
Wanting to be centred.
Gotta stay focused.
But the walls build…we build them, and then we’re trapped, or lost or uncentred, unfocused and the self we knew
is the self we’ve lost and the self we want to find.
Re-centre. Re-focus. Never does it ever go away.
My expression, that voice, that existence in my head that never ceases to be heard
screams one thing –
logic, knowledge
reality shouts another and something else…something else…something else just stands.
Listens. Reacts.
And decides what to do.
Like magic, it needs no words. No screaming or shouting.
It just ‘is’.

July 20, 1997 – after 1am

I’m smiling at myself. At my…upheaval. At my self-expression in the wee hours of the morning. At my dedication to getting the words out so desperately, so beautifully, so hopefully, so vulnerably. So much of me hasn’t changed at all…! I feel such love for that me…for that part that has been so alive in me my entire life. For the Animus, in her logic and knowledge, in her insistence on focus and organization. Oh…this is why I keep my journals, so I can reflect back and feel myself again…and feel myself the same…and feel myself differently.

Do you remember when you graduated from high school? For me, high school was everything. It was so fully who I was, why I was, what I was and wanted to achieve. I felt my best self growing…but clearly, as written by my own hand (!), that included not knowing who I was at all…but a collection of voices…looking for ink and a page.